Friday, April 13, 2012

Why Big Government Is Offensive. The faster the state expands, the more likely it is to violate your values.

How much government is too much government? When every aspect of daily living is controlled and dictated by the government, then liberty is lost.

I was hoping to make it through life without hearing television commentators repeatedly utter the word transvaginal. Yet that intimate territory is where the country headed in February, and it is where we will increasingly return as long as the government keeps assuming a greater role in our private lives.
The case, which (like so many culture war skirmishes) may already be forgotten by the time you read this, involved Republican legislation in Virginia that originally mandated an ultrasound test on every woman scheduled to have an abortion. The resulting image, according to the Virginia Senate’s initial version of the bill, must if possible “contain the dimensions of the fetus, and accurately portray the presence of external members and internal organs of the fetus,” in order to produce an estimate of gestational age.
The idea was clear enough: Gals who see tangible evidence of a growing organism in their womb will probably be less likely to go through with its extermination. The problem, as Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell pointed out in his critique of the original bill after it had made national headlines, was that “mandating an invasive procedure in order to give informed consent is not a proper role for the state. No person should be directed to undergo an invasive procedure by the state, without their consent, as a precondition to another medical procedure.”